neoclassic theory, poetry was seen primarily as an imitation of human life in a form designed to give artistic pleasure to the reader. Wordsworth, however, defined poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" and thus located poetry not in the outer world but in the inner world of the individual poet, in the fluid feelings of the poet. Romantic poetry tends therefore to take is its subject the personal experiences, thoughts, and feelings of the poet who writes a given work. The lyric poem written in the first person had earlier been regarded as a minor poetic form. The subjective tendency in Romantic poetry was seen in some works to be very important and less so in others, but always the poetry developed from the feelings of the poet and implied that the poet was the subject (Abrams et al. 7).
Romantic poetry was also seen as spontaneous, and no matter how polished, it gave the impression of being impromptu, with that "spontaneous overflow" noted by Wordsworth. The poet wrote from inspiration rather than consideration. The emphasis was now placed on the free activity of the imagination. Another tendency was for the poetry to be concerned with nature, and the natural scene was often the subject of choice for the Romantic poet. The poet imbued the landscape with human life, passion, and expressiveness, reflecting in part the current metaphysical concept of nature. Another Romantic choice of subject glorified the commonplace (Abrams et al. 9-11).
Jacob Korg points out that the life and times of Dylan Thomas have only a limited relevance to his poetry:
It is particularly clear from his early poems, where. . all of his originality is already on view, that he was occupied with introspections that lie outside of time and place, and that his style owes comparatively little to tradition or to example (Korg 13).
Thomas described his childhood as that of a perfectly ordinary, dirty, mischievous, and adventure...